YouSaid · the spoken record

Ravi Kumar

lines on the record: 44
first: 2026-05-25
most recent: 2026-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“XI has not seen the rise in business. I mean, first of all, XI was a relatively late entrant into this market. I mean, the fact that it even grew to two, I think, 3% adoption within a couple months of launch is a pretty significant feat. However, it has not been able to translate that into sort of the vertical growth that Anthropics saw over the last six, 12 months. But I don't think that these are unreported or underreported, certainly. I think if their acquisition of cursor goes through, well, actually, then we're going to have to start integrating cursor into XAIs market share. But I think there was a good reason for that acquisition as well. I mean, when you look at what XI really had available to it, which is this incredible compute power, also informed there's sort of a new agreement with Anthropic, acquiring something like cursor to actually drive some kind of model adoption, I think will be a really good move for XAI.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm talking about the everyone else and they're not being monetized and now they're at least being monetized via the big model companies paying something to get that. And instead of like your third degree connection on Twitter being where you get your news or like a fake news bot, like I'm just going to go to Claude or I'm going to go to Gemini and say like, is this story true? I mean, at Rock, right? Is this true?”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I don't know. I don't know if AI is actually going to be interesting to see if AI has actually lowered the sort of the viewership on a New York Times typical article, for example, right? I think that the people who subscribe to newspapers are probably going to keep reading newspapers as they do. Maybe on the margin there will be some reduction. But I don't know. I'm talking about everyone else.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good for sty I was less talking about the writing itself and more the reading of it, right? If you were to say before AI, there's only so many people who were actually reading the 10-page deep dive article, and then it gets telephoned out through social media. And by the time it reaches the majority of people, a lot of the context has been lost, the facts have slightly changed. If instead of the writing being consumed by like a small number of people and then miscommunicated out, like it's that the AI is reading and communicating the key details uniformly to everyone and thus like it incentivizes like you're kind of disincentivized to go deep and do good writing because by the time it's reaching everybody. So I'm saying like is it's the fact that AI is doing the reading is maybe going to incentivize like higher quality journalism.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of reporting, you know, let's say a reporter does their job and they talk to a bunch of sources and they go on the ground. They literally talk to people in person. The AI robots will never do that. They're not going to go to an event and interview people. They don't have that ability. But if as a reporter, you can sort of ask, you can do your sort of research process, the actual reporting work, and then have an AI write the straight summary of your reporting. That's not unreasonable. I mean, can it write a profile of someone? Maybe not. Can it do the investigative journalism aspect of having to go in person and talk to the county clerk and get some documents that are sealed? No, it can't do that. But it can write out what you found. So I think there is a world in which some parts of writing are done by AI models.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say this way. I think AI is pretty bad at most writing. I think it's really bad at writing blogs or anything opinionated. I think it comes out with results that everyone's, people have talked about this extensively. I know when I'm reading something that's written by an AI. It's not just this. It's what? It's not that. Yeah, yeah. The quiet part out loud. Yeah. But I will say it's pretty good at certain kinds of writing. Anything like highly structured, if you just tell it like, hey, just like give me straight up bullet points, summarize this thing that happened. And that's essentially what granola and note-taking apps do. It's pretty good at that. It doesn't add the weird, you know, vicissitudes of how it talks. It doesn't free job being comprehensive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On that front, I mean, that's very interesting because obviously there's tons of IP theft out there in the journalism world of people like, oh, where's the free version? Like, send me the free link. Like, why is this paywalled? And if some of that is now being captured by these large companies that are paying a fee, like it's not the same as if all of those people who were stealing the content are paying a full subscription price, but at least they're capturing some of that. And then also there's the aspect of like the AI has not like unlimited time to read, but as like human beings, like our attention spans are going the opposite direction. I don't think AI necessarily has that problem. It can consume a large article very quickly. Do you think it has the potential to actually improve the quality of reporting? Because it's not being, you're not competing for competition in the attention economy, for human eyeballs anymore because the humans are consuming it through some”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you would have It's a good question. I mean, so what comes to top of mind, maybe this is exactly what you're getting at, but a lot of the legacy media companies that are interesting because they're really going to come out on top of some of the transformations. I mean, you look at like the New York Times, a lot of newspapers which are doing deals directly with the model companies to sort of license their work. Does that mean they're going to be well positioned to be ahead on AI and to adopt them effectively as a workforce? There are some signs. I mean, I talked to a bunch of reporters who have sort of offhand said that despite AI is quite controversial still in a newsroom, but there's also an increasing amount of talk about like, hey, some writing is actually more appropriately done with an AI model and reporters can focus on reporting, something like that. So there's experimentation happening across sectors. And it's not exactly in the places where you'd expect it.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you would have asked me like a year ago do you think Deloitte will be more cautious or less cautious about implementing AI? I think I probably would have gone toward the less cautious side. Who are the companies that you would maybe historically group with Deloitte that are actually at the forefront of adoption? Like who are the surprise leaders in the adoption race that you're seeing?”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think part of it is that a lot of legacy players aren't really sold on AI being that transformative, or maybe they believe it will be transformative, but they don't necessarily think it's something they need to be extremely responsive to. There's a really good example, actually, because it was in a Wall Street Journal like a month or two ago. Deloitte sponsors a note in the Wall Street Journal. It's called like CFO Journal. And so I read it because it's normally just pretty good write-ups. It's not an ad it's just like sponsored by Deloitte about what CFOs are thinking about. And so the headline was something about how like this is how the big four, all the big four accounting firms are doing AI. Okay, that's an interesting thing for Deloitte to sponsor. And it goes, talks about how KPMGD is implementing agents for this task. And PY PWC is doing this thing and EY is doing all these experiments where they're giving their employees access to this and that thing. And then it said.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disruption can take a lot of different forms. It can take the form of a company overtaking one of their legacy competitors. It can also take the form of sort of like defensive M&A. It tends to depend on like how quickly those legacy players are recognizing the speed of growth. I'm sure you have people coming to you guys trying to get this data to understand how endanger their positions are. Are these legacy players like in the conversations you're having about your data? How concerned are they about these upstarts and do you think we're going to see more defensive M&A or sort of legacy players getting left in the dust?”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, it's going to be case by case, and many of them will be disrupted not only by AI, but simply because of demand for their software, which may dry up or change or skyrocket or whatever, right? So, I mean, that's what's going to be interesting about the next couple years. There's going to be an instinct to say that, hey, this company failed because of AI, whereas it very well may have just failed because it was not responsive to the needs of its customers. Maybe that was because it didn't apply AI. But also, maybe that was just because of the natural churn that ends up happening amongst firms that aren't innovating fast enough. So I think there's a tendency to make proclamations about the entire software market. But AI will certainly be a disruptor, but it's also one that every firm knows it has to respond to in some way. So we all have access to the same information there.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aggregators, but I think a lot of that market is unfortunately behind closed doors. The methodologies are not always clear. And in general, I think information is better when more firms and consumers have access to it. But decision making tends to be better. And so is it good for the businesses that sell data? Probably not, but it is better for the market overall, I think.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wonder the integrations that anthropic recently announced, okay, you can access Morningstar via Anthropic. You can access and you can access Anthropic via Morningstar. Same with Verisk for the insurance sector or the London Stock Exchange, Refinitive. Is that good for the software companies or bad? Why?”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it depends where you draw the line on what is AI, right? Like software that uses AI features to improve an existing legacy software product. Sure, we can call that AI native AI driven, but that's a different narrative from SaaS apocalypse, right? Like Adio is this extremely fast-growing London-based CRM. It's like a couple single digits of market share, but it's growing really quickly. Salesforce is 80% of the market. So it's not something that's going to be unceded very quickly. But Adio is like the AI native alternative. And I think it would be a mistake to discount the growth of these kinds of firms just because they have AI features and say that, oh, it's entirely because of entirely tied up the performance of the model companies. These are very different unique products. The model companies can't really compete on or have.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but it is interesting that the other example we talked about was keeping track of what model your tasks should go to. Like the biggest areas of growth that we all see are sort of just making sense of AI, right? Making sense of what's happening in the AI ecosystem when you look at the growth in SaaS, is it, is there anywhere where it's not tied to AI that you're seeing growth where there isn't some connection?”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we're content creators, right? Like sometimes you'll do, you'll have somebody on and they're talking about something. And it's just very institutional, right? Like it's for a very small group of people. There's maybe 10,000 people in the world that that piece of content is actually for, but yet it finds its way in front of a bunch of retail investors. And they're the ones who are commenting on it. Like, I think that this is in many ways like the version of that. Like these people are not, they're not talking about AI to reach the masses and explain to them like they're trying to justify a two trillion dollar valuation, a $10 trillion valuation. That's what they're shooting towards. And so if you want, if you want to justify that, well, the entire labor market is a pretty big total addressable market.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do as well. Doesn't mean that we're ever going to get rid of layoffs completely in the world. You know, there's always some reasoning for that in some world, in some way. Oh, yeah. But I'm not one of those doomers about AI. I would love to see some research about why the model companies keep saying that it's going to destroy all jobs because I don't see why that is helpful to them. By the way, that's not even the position of most economists. That's where I would like to see research efforts.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's really early. I'll say that no paper has answered it effectively because what you really want is you want a data set that shows, hey, these firms adopted AI and then here's how their headcounts change. I can tell you my early sense of it, two things are going on. One, there has been a decoupling of revenue growth from headcount growth, particularly at software companies where there is not an obvious, there is less obvious connection between growing your headcount and growing your revenue. That's one. The second thing, though, that counteracts it is that firms that adopt AI are typically quite fast growing and they have a lot of opportunity ahead of them. And that is in part because they're adopting AI. It's in part because of features of that firm already. But my instinct is that the firms that are adopting AI particularly well probably have a lot of work for people to do.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would measure head count, of course, is a big one. How is it going to affect jobs? Which jobs go up? Which jobs pull back? In engineering specifically, software engineering, there's some really interesting research about quantity of PRs, some quality measurement of PRs too. So I think that's really the next stage of our research.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I'll suggest actually that from an economic productivity measurement standpoint, the main interest is not to see, hey, which model company is ahead versus number two versus number three. Adoption is going to trend toward multiple large players. The next stage for our research is to measure not just business adoption, but the intensity of that adoption and try to come up with some definition of, hey, what does it look like to be a firm that adopts AI particularly well? And what is the path to that? And that's not an easy question to answer because the instinct is, well, let's look at the firms that spend the most on AI, but spend does not translate to productivity gains. If you ask people a year ago, they would say, well, the price of AI is going to go to zero, so there's no point in measuring spend. So there's a lot of really cool research happening, though, about the kind of productivity gains that a firm might get and trying to come up with the outcomes that”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So you can draw the line about what counts as AI adoption and how significant that adoption needs to be. Maybe you need some amount of paid adoption to really see productivity gains across a firm. Google's offering right now, I think most researchers in Econ are skeptical that chat subscriptions on their own will be driving the kinds of productivity gains we want to see in the economy. So we'll probably need something more comprehensive than just the kind of usage you get out of Google Workspace, at least most people do. But Google is definitely underrated. It certainly has a distributional advantage in that it's at all businesses that use Google Workspace.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google's underrated, I'll admit, because I'll point out one of the features of our research here is that we only track paid adoption. So there are a lot of firms that are using Google, but they're using it through Google Workspace, which integrates Gemini for free.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Deep Seek is a tricky case, though, because it may be cheap, but even if no one wants to use deep seek for security purposes, even if you're locally hosting it, there's just this perception around it, particularly if you're building a product that appeals to businesses or consumers. And there are other options available at this point. So I don't really see deep seek gaining adoption very quickly ever.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think 80% of venture back companies are using DeepSeek. We did. When DeepSeq first came onto the scene, now about a year ago, maybe a little bit over, we did see a spike in adoption for DeepSeek, but it never hit even 1% of firms on the platform. Now, we keep it in this tracker because I think it's helpful context for people, though there was a case to say we should remove it at this point.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it behooves them to make that change first so that at least more people can use it most effectively. They certainly have the demand for it. But I think it's going to come from whether the first step is going to be whether or not other firms that are in this space start offering it first and end up being that competitive pressure. And by the way, that's the bullcase for something like cursor, which can compete on the developer experience in that way in a way that OpenIN Anthropic in the absence of cursor or not incentivized to do. They can offer a cheaper, more performant model or better routing as part of the product experience.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Cursor does that. Cursor will automatically, I mean, I think the model companies will have to respond to that kind of competitive pressure increasingly because especially anthropic, right? People are increasingly hitting these compute limits.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, they make more money on tokens than other AI frontier labs and firms. Like Google makes money from a lot of stuff. They don't need you to spend money on tokens explicitly. Anthropic and open AI, 80% of their business revenue is token-based. So it's directly typed to usage and incentivizing you to do that.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you don't need the frontier model all the time. I mean, oftentimes it's worse for what you want because it's expensive and slow. You know, I find myself in my day-to-day oftentimes automatically routing things to the most expensive model, even though it's slower and I would actually prefer it just use haiku or sonnet when it's necessary. But you can expect the typical worker to make that decision. I mean, I'm fairly, my job is to be informed about AI trends so I know all the new models that are coming out. relatively good at applying best practices, but I don't think that, but that comes with a lot of tracking of the market. I don't think that you can expect most American office workers or workers in general to do that. And they shouldn't have to. And the market hasn't caught up to that use case yet. Open and anthropic have no incentive to offer an auto routing product that allows you to lower your AI spend because they make money on tokens.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Models outside of OpenIN Anthropics, or use OpenIES models and anthropics models, but use something that routes them over to the cheaper options when that makes most sense for the task. So those are the main headwinds I see on the model companies. Cost and competition, particularly from arguably themselves in terms of the cheaper models that are available, and then also the open source versions available.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you get to an extremely unsustainable spend path, right? Most businesses can't do that and probably shouldn't. And it's those firms specifically that are increasingly shifting some of their AI spend over to platforms like OpenRouter. So anything that would allow you to select between multiple models and ideally take advantage of free and open source models that are priced a little bit cheaper when they're deployed. Even that is still a very small share of spend. We've got like 3% of spent our platform goes directly through an open router versus an anthropic, at least of the AI spend on our platform. But increasing and particularly concentrated amongst those firms that are most incentivized to use platforms like OpenRouder, the ones that spend the most on AI. So they're finding the best value there. And I think it's likely that those practices will start to move down the chain and be adopted by the more mainstream firm too. Start to opt for”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Native product firms that were early adopters are the most likely to use multiple models and add more soft AI vendors over time. So if you want to consider the early adopters of sign of where the rest of the markets are going to go, and that has tended to be how AI adoption is developed in our data set, then you can assume that the average business is also most likely going to have a couple onboarded models. And then with that, There are signs that companies are becoming increasingly cost conscious as far as how much they're spending on their models. For the typical business that spends on tokens, so APIs and then also like the very high usage agent to coding token costs for that business have increased 13 extra just over the last year. It's still about for those high intensity spenders, maybe about 2% of business spend excluding payroll. So it's a very small share of actual spend that's happening. But you project out that 13%.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, I, in my post about Anthropic, I actually was a little bit hedging, if you would say it, about anthropics prospects going forward. I think when we put out, because we started putting out this metric last year called Ramp AI Index, which is tracking the sort of business adoption rates for anthropic versus open AI. For a long time, Open AI was the leader. Anthropic just took the first place spot. And what I found over the course of putting out this kind of research is that people will often interpret my findings as me saying, oh, it's over. Open eyes the leader or anthropics the leader's typically not, first of all, this is not my intention, but it's also not how I see this market playing out. An increasing share of firms on our platform are using more than one model in some deployed way across workers, whether that's a subscription-based deployment or if it's something that they're building into their AI.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is additive, but it is still so small. Again, we're talking about at the companies that are doing it for the first time, but doing it in an earnest way, less than a percent of the actual spend that's happening on their platform. So it's hard to measure whether or not it is truly something additive to their profits.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say quantitatively, neither aspect of Sessocalypse is supported by actual business spend. Neither aspect as in, it's going to change the way we buy it. Currently, it has not in any meaningful way. And nor has it killed off at least the companies that are frequently mentioned. And even look at perplexity. People talk about perplexity being an at-risk company. More in the pure play model space than a Figma. And yet perplexity is also one of the fastest growing vendors on ramp, seeing a lot of uptake specifically because it's offering products that the model companies have not competed on yet.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of different markets, but that's a very different claim than saying that, hey, we're immediately going to start to see businesses shift over to these new players. And especially because business spend can be pretty sticky. Now, the counterpoint to that, though, is that this is one of the most dynamic markets we've seen, particularly for buying software where month over month you will see large incumbents be replaced by the newcomers. Anthropic just did that with OpenAI. Now the most popular model used by businesses according to RAMP data. Cursor did that with GitHub co-pilot. So I think it's something worth keeping track of. But my main take is that SASAC as a pronouncement has come way too soon and is typically not informed by actual business behavior.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, you got a really good point, too, that all of this is going to be the result of a series of competitive responses by all of the very thoughtful, well-capitalized firms in this space. I mean, you look at Anthropic versus Figma, both of them now offering a design product. There's nothing inherent about Anthropic that makes it more capable of reaching designers where they're at or producing software that designers need. It has the model, it has the velocity product velocity to continuously make improvements. But Figma is a very popular product, which has access to the same models that Anthropic produces and sells. And so I haven't really understood from SaaS Paco's people what the intuition is to suggest that, hey, we're going to see all these SaaS companies die off. Now, I do think that there's going to be competition, right? Like Anthropic is a worthy new entrant into a life.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for that to really take off, I mean, in theory, you would only offer that as a company if you believe it's going to allow you to take market share or increase usage within an org. So is somebody going to have to go after everybody else's lunch with a token-based model to force that upon the rest of the market? What scenario would people fully switch? Would we see that take over?”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's definitely true that an increasing number of vendors software companies are starting to offer some kind of token-based product, Adobe, which I just mentioned is one of them, which knows that its product is increasingly going to be used by people who are using the AI capabilities, that has a marginal cost associated with it. Maybe there will be some down the line usage by an AI agent that you can't charge a seat in the traditional way. So more companies are starting to offer that, but whether or not that's actually playing out today as far as how businesses are buying SaaS right now, it's still half a percent of actual spend.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of the fastest growing vendors on our platform that businesses were continuing to buy from it. And so I think it just goes to show you that a lot of these pronouncements, they're coming from people's projections about how products may develop, but they're not often informed by the actual changes happening with respect to business spend.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then number two is the way people are buying software changing or people shifting to a new model where you buy agentic capabilities where you buy tokens instead of paying a SaaS platform fee or seats. And right now we see that neither of those trends are happening. At least not happening in any meaningful way. Seat-based contracts are still about 65, 75% spend, flat platform fees about 20, 30 percent. Even amongst the companies that have offered some kind of token-based pricing for their SaaS tools, we're only seeing uptake about half a percent of spend on those platforms. That's companies like HubSpot and Adobe. Both of them offer some kinds of token-based offering for their SaaS offerings. And then you want to talk about whether or not people are shifting away from SaaS providers. You can look at Figma, where Cloud Design came out. Everyone was just talking about Figma's strong performance and earnings. But we'd reported in our data set already a month ago that Fig”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that's what's so important about this kind of work is that we live in this world, particularly in text specifically where everyone wants to make these big pronouncements about where the market's going to go. Everyone seems like a pundit. No one's really armed with any data to inform them about what's actually happening in the market. So I have this unique job at RAMP where we see the spend data from 50,000 businesses, $100 billion of annual spend. And so we did set out to research what is actually happening in the market. New AI companies are coming out with competitor products to a lot of prominent SaaS firms. Are we seeing any declines in the adoption for this traditional SaaS companies? Are we seeing any changes in how people are buying SaaS? And that's really where I defied SaaS apocalypse into two different categories, right? There's one that's, hey, are people shifting away from traditional SaaS over to competitors provided by the model companies?”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say quantitatively, neither aspect of Sess Poc looks is supported by actual business spend. Neither aspect as in, it's going to change the way we buy it. Currently, it has not in any meaningful way, nor has it killed off at least the companies that are frequently mentioned.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of the most dynamic markets we've seen, particularly for buying software, where month over month you will see large incumbents be replaced by the newcomers, anthropic just did that with OpenAI. Now the most popular model used by businesses according to ramp data. Cursor did that with GitHub Copilot. My main take is it's apocalyptic as a pronouncement has come way too soon and is typically not informed by actual business behavior.”
2026-05-25 · a16z Podcast · Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source